WORD LISTS

A Quick Current Events Quiz: Pulitzer Prizes in the News

Talking about the Pulitzer Prizes awarded this week? Make sure you're up on these ten words essential for talking about the forces shaping our culture.

We publish this ten-word list drawn from news coverage in sources such as
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal and
The Washington Post every week.
Here are
six reasons why you should commit to it on a weekly basis.

A great word to know,
wry means "humorously sarcastic or mocking," and sums up a deliciously subtle set of associations in a handy three-letter word. Don't confuse it with
rye, as in the bread, though both carry a sense of a bit of bitterness and complexity of flavor.

Ms. Baker’s
wry drama about three misfits who work at a movie theater features long, lifelike silences in sometimes-awkward conversations.

Although it is often used as a formal way of saying "pay for," you don't always
compensate with money. You might compensate for being a jerk to your in-laws at the summer reunion picnic by being extra nice to Aunt Marge at Thanksgiving.

Mr. Taylor, 58, drew on records of a commission to
compensate slave owners for their lost property.

If you've studied Latin, you'll know
rectus means straight or right, and here,
rectify means to make right. A great motivation, apparently, for writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Ms. Marshall used to think that Margaret Fuller — the pioneering writer, critic and women’s rights advocate who died in a shipwreck in 1850 — was too well known to need a new biography...But when mentioned, her name drew only blank looks, said Ms. Marshall, 59, who teaches at Emerson College. “I had to go back and
rectify that.”

Handily,
easily,
effortlessly are all synonyms for
deftly. Think of watching your Pilates instructor work her way through a series of abdominal crunches. Or reading the prose of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

Mr. Fagin, 51, was cited by the board for his book “that
deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.”

Subsequent is an elegant word that keeps you from having to say, "the thing that comes after the thing I was just talking about." It means "next," or "following," and is used here to describe the manhunt subsequent to the Boston Marathon bombing, coverage of which earned
The Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize.

The Globe was awarded the prize for its reporting on the Boston Marathon bombing and the
subsequent manhunt that left a terrified city in a daylong lockdown.

Don't confuse
empathetic with
sympathetic. With empathy, think of Bill Clinton's famous "I feel your pain." To
sympathize is simply to understand that pain but not take it on personally. Perhaps the deeper empathy achieved by the
Globe's marathon bombing coverage contributed to it's winning of the Pulitzer prize.

The committee cited The Globe’s “exhaustive and
empathetic coverage” and also its use of “photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.”

Capturing the mood in Boston,
somber means serious and gloomy, though not necessarily lost to the throes of grief.

On its own website, the paper struck a
somber note: “With the one-year anniversary of the bombings on Tuesday, and the 118th running of the race scheduled for next Monday, the region is remembering the pain of the bombings and vowing to move resolutely forward.”

No matter the fetid gym socks or ancient cup of coffee turned science experiment, the mess in your room is unlikely to earn it the dubious honor of being called
squalid. The word is reserved for conditions that are truly foul, potentially disease-producing, run-down and in some cases, even morally compromised. Think degraded slums, rat-infested orphanages, and other Dickens-worthy horror shows.

Their series chronicled a trail of money from public coffers to operators of
squalid rental units across the county.

Word morphology fans might be interested to note that
complicit, the adjectival form of
complicity, or an accomplice's guilt, is not related to
implicit which means "unspoken."
Implicit relates to the Latin
implicare while
complicit comes from
complicare "to fold together."

The board noted the “courageous reports” that exposed the violent actions of Buddhist monks and the
complicity of officials in Myanmar and Thailand.